In Vitis Veritas: Wine, Wisdom & Awakening

The two opponents enter the ring.  Each is hopping in anticipation—left, right, left, right—toweling off the beads of anxious sweat that have formed on their foreheads before the match has even begun.  Huddled in their respective corners, the mood is tense, the room dark.  The ties on their gloves are given one last pull, their backs given one last smack of encouragement from a coach.  They turn and step into the light in the middle of the ring.  The crowd goes wild.

Ladies and Gentlemen, now introducing to you, your contesters for the evening, two wines who know what it means to box, the Wine Cube 2008 Cabernet/Shiraz from California, and the Aresti 2008 Cabernet/Carménère from Central Valley, Chile!  Let’s get ready to rumble!

Immediately, the Aresti takes the first punch.  He is taller than his opponent, and darker, loose locks of sable hair falling over his forehead.  His sinister dark eyes flare as the Cube ducks his swing and connects a solid jab to his left ribcage.  One shake of the head and the Aresti goes in again, lower this time, and his left uppercut makes the Cube’s head spin.  The Cube takes one step back and, once steadied, looks up at the Aresti and smiles, sweat dripping in his eyes.  He may be short, but his round, stout frame lends him a fluidity that the Aresti’s rigid structure cannot compete with.  He quickly ducks another swing to the head and lands a series of small, powerful jabs to the Aresti’s torso.  The Aresti grunts, a sour sound like a wounded bear, and manages to throw the Cube off him.  The Cube does a little dance around him, and with one last right hook, he takes the Aresti down.

And the winner is: the Wine Cube 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon/Shiraz, CA!

In all seriousness, there is a boxed wine revolution going on right now, and I strongly encourage you to abandon your dress shoes, your concern with appearances, and your awkward 3 Liter bottles of mediocre wine, and put some flowers in your hair, my friends, and liberate yourself (and your wallet) with one of the many top-quality boxed wines currently available on the market.  The Wine Cube (bottled in St. Helena, Napa Valley, by Trinchero Family Estates and available exclusively at Target) and the Chilean Aresti are just two examples of producers who have decided to throw the status quo to the wind and package good juice in an extremely cost-effective manner.  Plastic is much more inexpensive than glass, and the air-tight design lets you fill your glass from the box for a few weeks, removing the constant threat of oxidation and the fear of having to pour an unfinished bottle down the drain.

The Wine Cube is the ultimate easy-drinker.  A soft magenta, the wine smells like cherry cola, cooked raspberries, and sweet barbeque smoke.  It is not particularly complex, but it has a dried fruit and vanilla sweetness that makes it flexible and savory.  The dark brick-red Aresti was a new exploration: Tom went to BevMo to buy Black Box—another boxed wine that was Spectator’s top pick in a review of boxed wines last fall—and the sales dude talked him into buying the Aresti instead (it was on sale).  Although I have yet to try Black Box, I’m going to go ahead and say that this last minute switch was probably a mistake.  Although the Aresti is totally drinkable with food, on its own it has a weird sour funk to it like old black olives that I am not crazy about.  While innocuous, it is simply not exciting.  Since we have 2 boxes of the stuff—the equivalent of 8 bottles—Tom and I are thinking that we will use this wine to make Calimocho (the Spanish cocktail of red wine and cola) once the weather warms up.  I have a soft spot for this drink from my travels in Spain but at home I’ve never quite had the heart to mix my wine with cola.  Now, at this price, I don’t even feel bad.

So, go, my friends, and enter the ring.  For wine lovers, a boxing match has never been more exciting.

Cheers.

About a year ago, maybe more, my former boss, a man whose opinion I respect endlessly on matters of wine as well as many other things in life, conned me into buying a case of bad vino.

It was a deal through a friend of his. An obscure French varietal I had not yet been acquainted with called Tannat, from the Appellation Madiran Contrôlée, a commune in the Hautes-Pyrénées department in south-western France. A red table wine, only $80 for the 12 bottles. And it was old. 1995. It was the deal of the century. Whatever you say, boss, just tell me where to sign—and, hey, thanks for the hookup. I like to imagine he and his friend laughed devilishly as they loaded my case of wine, along with the several other cases purchased by unsuspecting fellow employees, into the back of his Subaru.

Madiran wines are often described as intense, and bold, and everything you read will tell you they need age to smooth out. After over 10 years in the bottle, drinking one of these bottles of mine, the Chateau de Crouseilles 1995 Madiran, was sort of like licking gritty tar. I opened the first bottle the night I brought the case home, and I’ve been giving them away as gifts ever since.

This weekend, in an act of pure and simple desperation, I opened the second to last bottle of the Tannat. The well had runneth dry in our home by Sunday night, and the company I was attempting to provide for wasn’t terribly discerning by this point, so I thought I could get away with it. I pulled the cork, smearing sediment all over my index fingers, and watched as the first sips were taken. No one choked. I sniffed my glass, eyes growing wide. It was a whole new wine.

Tom put it best, I think: “This wine smells like a cow patty.” As a couple of homegrown Sonoma kids, the smell of cow dung is both familiar and warm to us, and it wasn’t a far stretch to perceive it as something I’d like to drink. The wine was primarily earth: dirt, sweat, old leather, tire rubber. A bit of black fruit crouched in the corner of the glass like a quiet, storm-cloud cowboy in a dark, dusty bar, eating prunes and drinking boiled coffee. It was dark and murky and aggressive. It was fabulous.

As an added bonus, it also apparently very good for you. In a study on longevity, it was found that folks living in the Madiran region of France were out-living the rest of us, and a link was made to the local juice. Tannat contains an extraordinary high level of Procyanidins, a miracle antioxidant. The traditional winemaking style in the south-west of France also involves soaking the grape juice with the seeds much longer than most other wines, further enhancing the amount of Procyanidins present in the wine (hence the tannins that take 15 years to chill out). That’s something I can drink to.

Some things are worth waiting for. Thanks, boss.

Santé!
(a traditional Franch toast, meaning “to your health”)

After two rough bottles in a row, I was beginning to lose faith in this mission to find great wines for $15 and under. We were down to one last bottle in the house from my big BevMo run last month, and I was dubious. The Domaine Ste. Michelle Non-Vintage Brut (on-sale for $7.99) was chilled and opened without occasion or ritual, and I poured my glass with a definite lack of gusto, mindlessly gnawing on a piece of baguette.

The Domain Ste. Michelle Brut deserved so much more.

This delightful Columbia Valley sparkling wine mimicked the bubbles of Champagne in all the right ways, from the chardonnay/pinot noir grape blend to the soft yeastiness to the delicate, dancing effervescence. One sip and suddenly I was laying in a hay field, hiding my face from the sun under the protective branches of a lemon tree, letting the yellow straw tickle the backs of my knees. The scent of home-baked bread spread with fresh clotted cream and almond paste was leaking alluringly from the picnic basket by my side as I basked in the moment, lightly pulling the petals off fragrant flowers in a state of love- and sunshine-induced intoxication. The hymns of my childhood played softly in the distance, drifting toward me from the lovely steeples of the Church of Saint Michelle.

It is a truly beautiful thing to experience faith restored.

Cheers to that.

For a long time now I’ve seen the Crayola-esque labels of House Wine resting quaintly on the wine shop shelves, and for a long time now I’ve been interested in taking it for a spin. It’s the simplicity of the classic 3rd grade drawing-level house on the label that appeals to me, and I think the name is clever. House wine. Get it? Of course you do. In addition, I am a sucker for blends. Blend it and bring it, is what I say. So, the House Wine from The Magnificent Wine Co. of Washington State, with its 6 red grapes, its charming, elementary design, and its $13.99 price tag, made the cut as my Saturday evening vino.

If I had been tasting blind, I would have guessed this wine to be a Merlot, but House Wine is primarily Cabernet Sauvignon (73%), though it does offer doses of both Merlot (10%) and Syrah (8%) as well as bits of Sangiovese, Malbec, and Cab Franc tossed in—all sourced from Columbia Valley, WA. Surprisingly rusted in my glass with a very ripe and slightly chemically nose like rotting fruit, at first I feared it might be oxidized. I soon realized, disappointedly, that it simply is just not that great.

It is, however, exactly what it promises to be: a house wine. It’s a fair table wine with moderate alcohol and a pleasing if unremarkable palate full of soft raspberries and vanilla. It’s the slightly dimwitted yet attractive girl in your local 4-H Club (is that reference too Sonoma? Your local Chess Club, then…) who is often staring out into space, forgetting her own phone number, or trying to punch holes with a hole-puncher in one of the cascading waves of strawberry blond hair rolling past her cheekbone. Although she doesn’t bring a whole lot to the table, she is entirely inoffensive, and her simplicity is in fact endearing and somehow interesting. She might not knock you dead with her sharp wit and intellectual banter, but she will laugh happily at all your jokes. What more can you ask for from a girl who still draws with crayons?

Cheers.

I once knew a man in the wine industry who made it his personal goal to, upon retirement, enjoy a glass of fine champagne every night. To him, this simple act must have implied a retirement characterized by relaxation, a certain level of financial soundness, and just a touch of self-indulgent luxury after a lifetime of sweat and toil. A few years ago, I heard from a mutual friend that this man did in fact retire, and did, in fact, enjoy his glass of fine champagne on a nightly basis. My kind of man, right there.

This little story popped into my head the other night while going over my goals for 2010 and beyond. For a lifetime wine lover and someone who made his living off the stuff, it seems a fitting long-term objective, and I wondered if I could steal his idea, change the names and the dates and make it my ultimate goal to work hard enough and be inventive enough and stay healthy enough that I can afford myself a glass of fine wine by the time I retire in, say, 2050 (ambitious, I know…insert Medicare joke here). And this thought, as I glanced at my short tip stack from last night’s shift in the restaurant, led immediately to another: if I plan on drinking the good stuff every night for the last 20 or 30 income-less years of my life, I better stop messing around and start pinching pennies.

If you folks are up for it, I am going to stick with a theme here for a little while. One of my gifts from Thomas this Christmas was a book called The Wine Trials 2010, by Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch (trying saying that after tossing a few back). It is a guide to inexpensive wine: 150 readily available bottles under $15 that apparently beat $50+ bottles in blind tastings. I’m not going to try to pull a “Julie & Julia” thing and document my way through the whole book, but I do plan on checking some of these wines out with you by my side because, honestly, who doesn’t love getting a bang for their buck on a bottle of bliss?

First up, the Bodega Norton Barrel Select Cabernet Sauvignon 2006, Mendoza, Argentina. Now, we (ahem, Tom) actually goofed on this one. The wine in the book is not the “Barrel Select,” but just the plain ol’ Cab. The book also reviews the 2008. Still, the wine in the book is listed as $11, and the “Barrel Select” was snagged at the Cash N’ Check next door for $10.99, so I’m not quite sure of their stated difference. This leads me to a good side-note: beware of inexpensive foreign wines with the words “Barrel Select,” or “Reserve” slapped on the labels; there is no regulation in most places and the words often mean absolutely nothing beyond “Buy Me.”

Anyway, we are going to roll with this one since it fits the (dollar) bill. The wine was dark and youthful, dense, full on the palate, but a little thin in the finish. It reminded me of the Argentinean version of some Italians I met while backpacking in college…A young boy still confused by the hair on his own chest, sauntering a bit over-confidently onto the dance floor to show off the Tango moves he half-heartedly learned in a high-school dance class, hair slicked back with oil and the top four buttons popped on his shiny red shirt. You can tell he’s going to be good looking in a few years—attractive even, once he gets more comfortable in his own skin and loses the silk—but tonight his cologne smells like potpourri made with a bit too many bay leaves, which would be unwelcome if it didn’t help mask the alcohol on his breath. Regardless, when all is said and done, if you think I’m not going to let him buy me a drink, spin me around the floor a few times, you’re mistaken.

Sometimes it’s good to be young.

Next week, the Bogle Old Vine Zinfandel 2007, California, $11.

You can’t walk through a Safeway without tripping over a Bogle display so I don’t want any excuses: buy it, drink it, and next week, we can compare notes.

’Til then, stay thirsty.

Cheers.